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Setting the record straight. Our competitors say a lot of things ibm helps you find out the facts.

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Competitor Claims

Claim: HP says that Blade.org is nothing more than a business partner program to promote IBM BladeCenter — all cleverly packaged in the guise of an open standards body.
Claim: An HP published report from 2007 stated that their blade offering was more energy efficient and their cooling technology is superior to IBM BladeCenter

About BladeCenter and System x

IBM BladeCenter and System x are designed for a broad set of client needs from large enterprises to general businesses and high performance computing. IBM's line of x86 systems are backed by hundreds of patents and 100 number one performance benchmarks over the last 10 years. During that time, IBM invested a half a billion dollars in X-Architecture innovations. The result has been a very strong position, particularly in scalable systems. For example, according to IDC, in 2007 IBM continued to dominate the high-end scalable x86 market with more than 60% share, three times more than its closest competitor.

Our System x Server just became the first single x86 system to burst through the 1 million transactions per minute barrier with the TPC-C benchmark.
IBM BladeCenter® uses up to 50 percent less floor space and up to 35 percent less energy than competitor rack servers without sacrificing performance.
We believe nobody matches the range of operating systems and processors of our Blades. Our clients are able to mix and match five blade chassis and 13 blade server types with six different operating systems – far more than any other blade vendor.

Claim: HP says that Blade.org is nothing more than a business partner program to promote IBM BladeCenter -- all cleverly packaged in the guise of an open standards body.

The industry disagrees.

In a recent research note, IDC analyst Jed Scaramella wrote, “Even though the consortium was spearheaded by IBM, Blade.org has grown into a successful stand-alone industry organization. Evidence of this is that many of the collaborative solutions that have been developed do not involve IBM.”¹
Through blade.org, we opened up our BladeCenter architecture to help companies build new products for the blade market. Over 500 companies have downloaded the open specification and have built network and storage cards, switches and software. Blade.org is helping them do this at lower design costs – with lower costs for buyers.
More than 50 top-tier venture capital firms have invested nearly $1 billion in Blade.org member companies.
Just recently, MetLife, Morgan Stanley and CBS Television joined blade.org

Claim: An HP published report from 2007 stated that their blade offering was more energy efficient and their cooling technology is superior to IBM BladeCenter.

Time and again, HP’s claim on cooling superiority has been shown to be inaccurate. We know HP has a flawed design that prevents efficient cooling.

Edison Group, an independent technology analysis and consulting firm, found that IBM BladeCenter H requires nearly 10 percent less power than the equivalently configured HP BladeSystem c7000. Extrapolated over 224 servers and with an energy cost of 9.4 cents per kilowatt-hour, this can save you up to $12,000 per year².
And, the super-efficient IBM BladeCenter E chassis configured with low-power components requires more than 30 percent less power than that same HP BladeSystem c-Class configuration.³ View these findings and others at: www.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/news/power/
According to a 2007 report from Experture and Robert Frances Group, IBM blades have a lower total cost of ownership than HP blades. In addition, IBM blades deliver up to 29% less energy costs. Over five years, even HP's more efficient C-Class model could cost $24K per rack more in power than BladeCenter E.
HP has fallen short on power and cooling efficiency for the past several years. With the BladeSystem c-Class, HP started from scratch and still fell short in designing a solution that matches the system-level efficiency of IBM BladeCenter.

IBM responds to the competition

¹ IDC Link - Blade.org Identifies Datacenter "Mega-Trends" June 26, 2008

² Edison Group, Blade Server Power Study (PDF, 796 KB), November 2007.

	IBM BladeCenter E	IBM BladeCenter H	HP BladeSystem c7000
Blades	14 HS21 XM LV	14 HS21 XM	16 BL460c G1
Processor	2 x 1.86 50W Intel Quad Core (L5320)	2 x 1.86 80W Intel Quad Core (E5320)	2 x 1.86 80W Intel Quad Core (E5320)
Memory	4 x 2GB DIMMs	8 x 1GB DIMMs	8 x 1GB DIMMs
Memory interleaving	Non-interleaved	Interleaved	Interleaved
Local disks per blade	2 x16GB solid state	2 x16GB solid state	2 x 36GB 10K SAS HDD
Peak power consumption per blade server (watts)	224.84	300.63	333.43